Prospects for barium tagging in gaseous xenon

Publication

Publication

Presented at the
5th Symposium on Large TPCs for Low Energy Rare Event Detection and Workshop on Neutrinos from Supernovae (December 2010), Paris

Tagging events with the coincident detection of a barium ion would greatly reduce the background for a neutrino-less double beta decay search in xenon. This paper describes progress towards realizing this goal. It outlines a source that can produce large quantities of Ba++ in gas, shows that this can be extracted to vacuum, and demonstrates a mechanism by which the Ba ++ can be efficiently converted to Ba+ as required for laser identification.